Digital marketing is a field that is constantly evolving. If you’re trying to get into the space, it can seem overwhelming with the amount of content out there. And if you’re already in the weeds of your own marketing campaigns, then you know how hard it is to juggle management, reporting, and upskilling so you stay on top of the best strategies and tactics.
We want to keep things tight and tidy, while also helping you get equipped with the strategies you need for success. We’ve pulled together 3 expert tips that will help you put together a strong foundation for growth and boost your digital marketing performance.
Expert Tip #1: Align your goals and campaign objectives
While it may seem pretty obvious, making sure you specify what your goals for each campaign are and how they feed into your overall strategy is really important. Yes, for most businesses the end result we all would like to achieve is more sales, but conversions aren’t the objective of each campaign.
In order to have a curated audience of highly motivated potential customers, you need to start by casting a wide net. For your brand activation campaigns, your goals won’t be purchases or even website visitors. At the very top of your marketing funnel strategy, you’re looking to just see who responds to your products and whose eye you catch. You can then use this audience for retargeting and moving them down your funnel.
It is, therefore, important to always plan each campaign as part of a whole. The brand awareness campaign will feed into your education and website traffic campaign. And those who’ve gotten to your site, browsed or interacted more with your brand can then be targeted with bottom of funnel conversion campaigns that will ultimately get them to make a purchase.
It’s key to keep in mind the filtering down of the audience, if for no other reason than the cost. Video views and impressions are really cheap, but conversion campaigns on social media cost a lot per click. If you’re not careful about who you’re targeting, then you can very quickly burn through your campaign budget.
Expert Tip #2: Always be feeding your funnel
Continuing in the same vein, it’s crucial to make sure your top of funnel activity is always feeding into your bottom of funnel goals. You need to clearly identify your end goal, be that a sale, a lead, or a download and ensure everything leads towards that goal.
How we do marketing has changed a lot over the past century, but the way buyers think has remained pretty consistent. It’s very rare that someone who is seeing your ads and hearing about your brand for the very first time is going to jump and buy your product immediately. This is why we nurture and remarket to interested potential buyers to guide them through the funnel, educating them, and providing incentives to overcome purchase objections.
Again, as we mentioned previously, advertising to a wide audience who has little to no knowledge of your offering with a conversion goal is a good way to get mildly curious people who click your ad and immediately bounce off. You don’t get the sale since they ended up not really interested (or just not interested enough yet to make a purchase), but you do get a hefty price tag of $5 (sometimes a lot more, depending on your sector) for that click.
Justifying top of funnel spend
What can sometimes prove tricky here is justifying that top of funnel ad spend to decision-makers who control your budget. Because of the length of the purchase journey, the difficulties with different attribution models, and the overall headache of figuring out which campaigns are truly performing, the top of funnel campaigns will likely not be linked to that much revenue directly.
As a result, we see a lot of businesses divest from top of funnel spending and focus the majority of their budget on the bottom of the funnel. This is a sure way to starve the flow of interested audiences, have a high frequency of ads, and get a very small bang for your buck.
Fiorella emphasizes, “Brands that invest in brand awareness and consideration campaigns will succeed against competitors. Driving qualified traffic on a monthly basis has a big impact on your performance campaigns and cost per result.”
Expert Tip #3: Tailor your content to each platform
Each social media platform has its own vibe. You need to tailor the ads and content you put up on each to mesh with the other types of content users are seeing there. A super polished ad could look really out of place on TikTok, but might perform really well on Instagram, for example.
Rather than jumping on the next new channel immediately, take the time to invest in an organic content strategy first, get to know your audience and how they behave and interact on that platform. Only once you’ve spent some time there and found examples of successful campaigns by other brands and found out if your audience is active on this platform at all should you invest heavily in paid ads.
Conclusion
When you’re in the thick of building campaigns and under pressure to deliver tangible results, it can be hard to take a step back. Take a pause as the mid-year lull approaches to establish a good framework for your campaigns that you can implement throughout the rest of the year.
Essentially, it doesn’t matter if you’re running an evergreen campaign or a short-lived weekend sale push, you should implement a marketing funnel approach throughout. If you neglect the top of the funnel, then you’ll end up starving the bottom of the funnel and not getting very many sales. And if you only focus on wide audience campaigns and brand building, your sales will materialize but will be few and far between. It’s really important to strike the right balance for your audience and business.
Finally, make sure to get to know the channels and the content that performs well on each. While you can definitely repurpose content to a point on multiple social media platforms, you don’t want everything to be identical either.
With the marketing funnel strategy and the expert tips we discussed here in mind, you’re going to have a strong foundation for growth for the second half of 2022.
Want to learn more about the marketing funnel and how to structure your campaigns to scale online? Download Optily CEO’s free eBook today.
